Ladner’s Take: Open Enrollment Might Just Be Inevitable

By Jennifer Wagner

EdChoice Fellow and longtime school choice advocate Matt Ladner has a solid new blog post over at the Fordham Institute about the future of open enrollment and the changing demographics of our nation, specifically lower birth rates and longer life expectancies.

Using his home state of Arizona as “the demographic canary in America’s coal mine,” Ladner makes a compelling case that three main factors — the pre-pandemic baby bust; an increase in homeschooling and microschooling; and new and improved school choice policies — are driving toward a potentially unpleasant conclusion for those folks who’ve high-tailed it to the suburbs to access high-quality public schools:

The upshot of this is that many suburban districts are going to find themselves short of students, which means that many may lower the drawbridge to allow in open enrollment transfers to avoid closure. When this happened in Arizona, the choice knob got turned to “11.” Almost all Arizona districts participate in open enrollment now, even the fancy suburban ones.

Though it’s not a policy we focus on in our advocacy efforts, I’m a broken record when it comes to the issue of open enrollment and how we talk about school choice.

Even those who staunchly defend traditional public education can see that there are severe economic and racial inequities baked into the system when it comes to urban versus suburban schools. (Don’t believe me? Take three minutes and watch this video on the history of redlining featuring 50CAN’s Derrell Bradford.)

Those inequities, of course, are the result of assigning schools to families based on where they live, not what they need, and funding those schools in many states using property tax dollars.

The more you pay for a home, the more you pay in taxes, which in turn funds your school district. (Spoiler alert: We’re working on some cool new research into the effect on property values over time related to expanded K-12 options in certain geographic areas.)

The thing about open enrollment, as opposed to private school choice, is that it doesn’t seem to upset anyone when a family up and leaves a school for a school in another district, taking all of their state and federal funding with them to that new school. No one accuses that family of “siphoning” money from traditional public schools, presumably because the funding is staying in the traditional K-12 system.

But more barriers are gone. And if open enrollment policies are designed to ensure equitable access, students are able to move within a much broader system with many more options available. Is it a perfect solution? No. But does it accomplish the greatest good for the greatest number of people on a potentially very short timeline? Absolutely. A potential public policy solution that might make John Stuart Mill proud.

All of that is ideal for those of us who work hard each day to explain why expanded options are so important to level the playing field for people who can’t afford to buy or rent in an expensive neighborhood with high-performing schools.

I’m not in this movement because I’m some super-smart economist or a policymaker looking to make a difference.

I’m here because it ticks me off that so many families across our country don’t have access to schooling that meets their kids’ needs or will help them succeed. The gap between the haves and have-nots continues to expand — and one of the places it’s most evident is within our K-12 system.

And so I will continue to beat the drum for open enrollment as a way to literally break down boundaries for families, but also to help those who might not be directly affected or involved in education understand how one-sidedly broken the system currently is.

Ladner says it best in his conclusion:

A system of school based more on opportunity and less on suburban opportunity hoarding empowers families to decide which schools remain open and which close. It’s also cost-effective, allowing schools to get more learning for each dollar spent.

It’s time for the opportunity-hoarding to end.

Jennifer Wagner is a mom, a recovering political hack and the Vice President of Communications for EdChoice, a national nonprofit that supports and promotes universal school choice.